Instadeath

An instadeath, short for instant death, is a mechanism which, when applied, guarantees that you die immediately, even if you had hundreds of HP. If you have a wand of death or finger of death, then you can instadeath some monsters.

Causes of instadeaths are:

• Cockatrices
  • Touching a cockatrice or chickatrice corpse without gloves.
  • Eating a cockatrice or chickatrice corpse, or eating the corpse of Medusa
  • Kicking a cockatrice or chickatrice corpse without shoes.
• Being hit by a death ray while not having magic resistance. This can be achieved by:
  • zapping yourself with a wand of death or a finger of death. ("You irradiate yourself with pure energy!")
  • zapping a wand of death or finger of death at a monster, and being hit by the ray reflecting off a wall, or the monster's reflection.
  • having a monster with a wand of death zap you, typically the Gnome With The Wand Of Death.
  • being touched by the touch of death. The Wizard of Yendor and high level liches can use this against you.
• Occasionally, poison (especially food poisoning) causes an instadeath, unless you have poison resistance.
• Standing near a collapsing drawbridge.
• Being drowned by a sea monster, although this technically takes at least 2 turns.
• Intentionally level teleport yourself to level 0, or to any level "higher" than -1: level 0 is nowhere, -2 to -8 is above the ground, -9 is Cloud Nine and -10 and above is Heaven. -1 is ground level, so teleporting there is essentially the same as quitting.
• Suffering a system shock while attempting a self-polymorph. Technically, you only lose up to 30 hit points, but this is often fatal to low level characters.

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